What is the worst POSSIBLE addition to a recruitment website?

While some industries offer a positive plethora of beautiful imagery for their new website design, it has to be said, on some occasions recruitment businesses can sometimes struggle with their visual direction for their all-new recruitment web design.

Contrast the visual resources of a web design for an African based charity for instance – amazing people, beautiful landscapes, vibrant colours, with that of the corporate recruitment company, the latter having a slightly more limited library from which to choose.

How does one visually describe a recruitment company? Typically one would head towards big corporations, cities, smart looking folk, ‘deals’, ‘dynamism’ and ‘commerce’; not necessarily a bad thing if you have access to an excellent stock library and a patient designer willing to sift through the garbage to find the choice visuals. Sometimes there is room for something more abstract, an illustration, moving visual or something a little more subtle in conjunction with a catchy slogan. Now we’re getting somewhere.

But what is the worst?

So everyone has seen those stock images of a handsome chap and an attractive lady looking direct into the camera, not a blemish on them, sharply dressed and smiling – they’re saying ‘we’re young, beautiful, happy and smart so who wouldn’t want to work with us?!’, while I would assume that in most cases perhaps the staff of said organisation may not be quite as beautiful as the models in the photograph, the impact could also be lost because images of that nature are rather common.

But the one image type that epitomises a lack of imagination, a wanting-to-look-like-you-do-good-business-and-stuff is the focus picture of the handshake. No people, no expressions, no context, JUST a handshake. The connotations are so very clear, and it’s such an easy choice. I’m willing to accept that this article is potentially born out of a personal vendetta of my own, rather than any particular artistic research project into the nature and psychological impact of a handshake picture upon the viewer, but I implore any reader of this article to remove any handshake pictures from your website, marketing material or general imagination immediately!

Some rather fantastic specimens of this image can be found below:

The most popular handshake photo found within a leading stock library, though to me it looks a little too much like a deal has just been closed in an alleyway behind a nightclub

The ‘lone reacher’, another handshake visual classic:

And finally we have Jonny Light Suit on the left – who wears suits this lightly coloured in this day and age? he can’t be from the UK it’s far too cold to sport that sort of getup over here.

LONDON

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